Leonardo and the Divine Proportion

Between 1496 and 1498, Leonardo (Vinci 1452 -Amboise 1519), was the author of 60 drawings that were described as very graceful and supreme figures of all platonic and mathematical, regular and dependent bodies, which in perspective representation cannot be done better in the world. Friar Luca Pacioli (Borgo San Sepolcro 1445 circa - 1517 circa) described them like this, when praising his friend Leonardo, who had drawn the figures that Pacioli had only described conceptually in the De Divina Proportione, a work that was printed in 1509. With his glorious and ineffable left hand, as the friar called it, Leonardo made, not only the five regular polyhedrons visible and comprehensible to everyone, after centuries of silence, but also many other solids deriving from them or connected to them. From that moment on Leonardo confirmed the triumph of those solids and of the Divine Proportion, which those figures needed in order to be drawn. Paragraphs: The glorious and ineffable left hand, The Nature of the Universe and the Platonic solids, The Golden Section or the Divine Proportion, The three elementary most simple figures, How to graphically obtain the Golden Section, Regular figures: pentagon, hexagon and decagon, The regular polyhedrons and their development, The construction of the cube, of the tetrahedron, of the octahedron, The construction of the icosahedron and of the dodecahedron, Chronological summary of Leonardo's life